The Fedora 14 Beta was released today, but as a Network World article points out, it "will be the first Red Hat supported distribution to let users choose MeeGo as their desktop." This new release will also include the Sugar interface, intended for netbooks, and "will also be the first version to fully incorporate Red Hat's VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure), called SPICE, or Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments. SPICE will allow Fedora to host virtual desktops that can be accessed over a network."

The problem is that making the UI of the OS touch-friendly, whether with Unity or MeeGo, is only a very small part of the job... You have to remake the interface of all applications. We'd have to push everybody to remake their interfaces: LibreOffice, FireFox, the Gimp, Inkscape, Ardour, Blender, MPlayer, insert-a-popular-open-source-app-here, etc. Not impossible, but open-source UI sucked for years [/troll], why would it change? (maybe yes, it will, because Qt and Gnome matured, and well-coded apps have a good separation between the UI and the working bits, but that's also a question of mentality, and ressources).

Just look at Gimp, they have accepted to change the UI only later. (And everybody is still waiting for the next version with 1 window)

If you're trying to find elements of photoshop's workflow in an UI that's not photoshop's, that UI surely sucks

What I mean is that this judgement of GIMP's UI is highly subjective. When you're experimented with it and get the basic workflow, you understand how powerful it is. Flexibility, discoverability, readability, quick access to a lot of functionality, pen tablet friendly widgets, much better curve editing... These are all good sides of the GIMP UI.

I think that like most people who unilaterally hate gimp's UI, you do it for the same reason as I hate Photoshop's : not being used to it.

Well, that's kind of the point of MeeGo, isn't it? Not to take existing apps off the shelf and plop them on a tablet, which worked so well for Windows over the past 5 years [/sarcasm], but to code up touch interfaces in QT4 for apps and release them as MeeGo apps.

Yes. But how will that articulate with Fedora and OpenSUSE also implementing MeeGo ? Will the MeeGo repositories be accessible? Will the apps be compatible despite the differences in implementation and library versions? Or will we have completely different ecosystems between the "official" netbook MeeGo (managed by Intel?) and others?